Sixers hoping to steal a path to the postseason

PHILADELPHIA — The Sixers won 22 games in the unofficial first half of the season, not one that Doug Collins can remember as being lucky, or odd, or a gift. There were no game-winning half-court heaves, no banked-in three-pointers at the horn, no reason for the other coach to chase the refs into the tunnel.

“We haven’t stolen any games,” Collins was saying, just before the All-Star break. “But we have left a few slip away. And those hurt.”

He has been around basketball long enough to know one thing, yet to hope for another. He knows that at the NBA level, breaks are earned, not deserved. But he hopes that he is wrong and will keep waiting for an off-court official to give his team multiple chances to win after hours, like one did for the Russians when he was an Olympian in 1972.

Collins wasn’t whining for a late-game call, wasn’t trying to rationalize how a franchise can go from the seventh game of a second playoff round to an All-Star break danger-point of missing the postseason altogether. Rather, he was in his other comfortable role — as an analyst, not a coach. In that, he saw what everybody else has seen, including that one fan who recently bought 18 Sixers tickets for less than a buck.

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The Sixers win when they have bounce, honor the game plan, practice hard and even at their level, overachieve. But in the NBA, the better teams can win, at least on occasion, despite any of that. They can win with a blessing of surplus talent, with a veteran presence, with a stealth defensive stopper.

So as the Sixers return to PCOM today to plot a late-season route to a third consecutive postseason, they are starting to realize that they have too little of any of that, despite a popularly approved offseason rebuilding project.

They are starting to realize that they miss Elton Brand and his sneaky, late-game rebounds, his quick tip-ins, his calm when down six with a minute to play. They have to know that they miss Andre Iguodala, who could steal a game with a first-quarter blocked shot, even when few were noticing. They have to realize that they miss Lou Williams and his bunch-scoring talents. And they must admit that they miss the benefits of the growth of that nucleus, the one they were too impatient to trust.

“I thought we had a mental letdown in Phoenix, in a back-to-back effort after beating the Lakers,” Collins said. “I thought we had a mental letdown in Cleveland. They had no Kyrie Irving, and Jeremy (Pargo) hits us for 28. And then we let two games slip away against us with Memphis and San Antonio. We have no games that I think we’ve stolen, where we can go in and say, ‘Oh, man, we’ve stolen that game.’ So to me, we have had four slip away, what are we? That’s how fragile it is.”

They would be 26-25, but they’re not. And there was not much in the pre-break portion of the season that would suggest they can be, not even the continued development of All-Star scorer Jrue Holiday. There is the promise of a fragile Andrew Bynum, but that’s not worth the scrap paper that the IOU is written on. Thad Young has been hurt, and when he returns, he can help.

Maybe?

“This has been a taxing year,” Collins said. “After the high we came off of last year and all that we did in the offseason that we thought it would help us to be a lot better. And it just seems like at every turn, we’ve been kicked in the gut.”

The Sixers played .530 basketball to gut-out the final Eastern Conference playoff spot in a shortened 2011-2012. In a regulation season, that percentage would yield 44 victories. So they would have to win at least 21 of their final 30 games to hit that number but only have 12 home games remaining.

Bynum could help. So could a trade at the Thursday deadline. But it’s getting late for the Sixers to start stealing something.